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#42 Spoon – “Hot Thoughts” – 52 Weeks of 2017 Albums

Austin, Texas indie darlings Spoon have been making their own brand of arty experimental indie pop for close to 25 years now. Centred around longtime band-members Britt Daniel on lead vocals and guitar along with drummer Jim Eno, their 9th album in 21 years, Hot Thoughts demonstrates a sharp shift away from the arty and more directly towards the pop. Side 1 and Side 2 are divided equally into 5 parts, one fifth art four fifths pop with each side concluding with the longer artier pieces. By far the two most interesting tracks on the album are the closers, side one’s “Pink Up” along with side two’s sax heavy five minute instrumental “Us” which would not have sounded out of place on either one of Bowie’s triumphant Berlin period albums Low and Heroes. What Hot Thoughts suffers most from is a complete and utter identity crisis. The band went so far as to bring in indie rock god Janet Weiss (Sleater-Kinney, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, The Go-Betweens, Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst, The Shins) as the albums officially credited “sequence adviser” to help make sense of these disparate tracks in search of a home. Perhaps the simplest solution would have been to flesh out the musical topography over two different albums instead of trying to jam it all into one neat little Hot Thoughts box because, contrary to what that old bearded hippie philosopher once said, the whole is not always greater than the sum of its parts. Roll over Aristotle and tell Spoon the news.